Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Currently, storm protection is usually employed in layer 2/layer 3 Ethernet switches, to avoid excessive bandwidth consumption due to flooding of unknown-unicast/multicast/broadcast traffic (broadcast storm). The storm protection exercises an upper limit for unknown-unicast/multicast/broadcast traffic respectively on per port and/or Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) basis.
However, the MAC learning speed of switch is not in line rate. Take a typical switch employing ERP (for example, ERICSSON SPO1400) as an example, 3 k/s MAC learning speed with 256 k dynamic MAC cache space, 256/3=85.3 s is needed if 256 k MAC involved. Unknown unicast traffic will be flood within unknown-unicast up limit, so, most packets are dropped because of storm protection. Even if protection switch is happened within 50 ms, the real traffic interruption time is coming to seconds instead of millisecond if related MAC number need learning is in thousands, since traffic interruption time is almost near to ERP switching time plus MAC learning time. A similar problem would arise in the MPLS-TP network protection and the other network protection methods employing storm protection.